Photographic Collages Research Articles

Looking In, Looking Out: Mapping Chinese Exclusion and Imperial Expansion in a San Francisco Photographic Collage

Looking In, Looking Out: Mapping Chinese Exclusion and Imperial Expansion in a San Francisco Photographic Collage

Le souvenir des Guerres balkaniques en Serbie en images et en mots

During and immediately after the Balkan Wars, different types of visual narratives emerged in Serbia to depict the war - the illustrated periodical, represented by Balkanski rat [The Balkan War], the photographic exhibitions, postcards, and photographic collage appendices of alleged atrocities committed by the belligerents of the Balkan Wars. The first three forms were created for a domestic audience and dissemination among Serbia’s military and civic elites and the latter form for foreign governments and their publics. From these visual materials emerged an official narrative depicting Serbia as fighting for the liberation of Serbs living in Ottoman territory (even if peoples of Ottoman Macedonia did not identify as Serbs) in the First Balkan War and, in the Second, as resisting the territorial ambitions of Bulgaria.

Literature and Medicine 2000-2007.

Literature and Medicine 2000–2007 Maura Spiegel (bio) and Rita Charon (bio) Our co-editorial retrospect on Literature and Medicine from 2000 to 2007 exposes major conceptual and disciplinary breakthroughs that, at the time, were of course invisible. We can see now how significant a role L&M played in the emergence and development of the genre of illness narratives, which by 2022 has emerged as one of the towering developments not only in literature and medicine but in the humanities and the public discourse altogether. After publishing her 1993 authoritative Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography, Anne Hunsaker Hawkins became an L&M Associate Editor in 1996. Anne characterized what she termed "pathography" as survival stories or modern adventure stories and, perhaps more tellingly, as "cautionary parables," striking the parallel to conversion narratives in which life undergoes a total bouleversement to become something else entirely.1 As Guest Editor of our Spring 2002 Special Issue on "Literature, Medicine, and Children," Anne devoted a section to "Personal Narrative," written by several parents about their acutely or chronically ill or disabled children. In "Research Shows: A Narrative of Teaching and Learning," English professor Deborah Minter provided pages from her journal during her baby's treatment for an aggressive leukemia. She counterposed dramatic scenes from visits to the pediatric oncologist, support groups with other mothers of severely ill children, and classroom discussions in her ironically timed college seminar on "Stories and Human Experience." Throughout, the reader sees the narrator relying on her own intellectuality as a ploy to get one step removed from what she is actually going through. Her artist husband Dale contributes a series of photographic collages that juxtapose teddy bears with IV drips and a rocking horse with an intubated baby, with one unbearable shot of a doll's head enshrouded in a plastic bag. Literary scholars Joanne Trautmann Banks and Michael Bérubé, well known to L&M (Banks wrote the first essay in the first issue of [End Page 213] our journal in 1982), themselves had severely ill or neuroatypical children. Banks's son Piers suffered irreversible neurological damage as an infant from uncontrolled seizures. Bérubé's son Jamie was born with Down's Syndrome. The parents' comments widen the picture toward both the existential and the surreal, exposing the "comedy, tragedy, and higher comedy" (Jo's words) of parenting ill children while nailing the personal confrontations with embodiment and mortality that had been theirs every day.2 Jo narrates days in Piers's life in his residential school for developmentally challenged children and adults, in effect donating the protagonist position to the child. Darker, Michael's account probes the ironies and pathos in the family's situation with a physically healthy, rambunctious child whose thoughts and actions travel uncommon paths. Michael repeats the words "solace," "consolation," or "inconsolable" six times in his five-and-a-half page essay, "Life Stories: In Response to Deborah Minter." Consolation is sought by both the child and his parents. Disrupting this otherwise rather snarky representation of the endlessness of a family's situation with a child requiring above-average attention, the idea of consolation recalls Anne Hawkins's sense of pathography as a religious genre. What seemed at the time an odd pleat in the mood of Michael's essay became telling upon reading Michael Rowe's essay "Metamorphosis: Defending the Human" (Fall 2002), which indirectly takes up the notion of consolation. A Yale sociologist of poverty and urban health and author of Crossing the Border: Encounters between Homeless People and Outreach Workers (1999), Rowe seems particularly well qualified to write a personal essay about illness narratives. He lived through the long illness and death of his teen-aged son after a second failed liver transplant. Rowe paid me [Rita] a visit some time after the events recounted in his paper. This young father joined me in my office, exuding urgent, charged affect, sitting on the edge of his seat, leaning forward as if to extinguish the distance between us, asking without words, "Why did he die? Why is he gone? It cannot be that he is dead." Although the essay provides an elegant analysis of Kafka's "Metamorphosis," it...

‘NO GO’: Artists, Trespass and the Aftermath of Occupation

Abstract This paper considers the relationship between site, memory and fine art practices, as viewed from the perspectives of a practitioner informed by the discourses of commemoration and the aftermath of conflict. Through an exploration of art works derived from encounters with displaced spaces, peripheries and edgelands, Gough situates his practice – and that of several selected artists – as a conversation between “place”, “space” and the geopolitical. Artists have long employed the notions of ambiguity, transition and the hybrid in their work. Framed within the discourses of liminality and aftershock, practitioners have explored various strategies to address rites of in-betweenness to evoke a sensation of transition and displacement. To explore these ideas, Gough posits a number of his artworks as ‘provocations’, and draws attention to other contemporary artists and practitioners similarly drawn to the aftermath of constructed places and re-constructed histories. The paper draws upon two suites of Gough’s work each addressing aspects of the aftermath, and each to a degree addressing issues of transgression. The first is a series of site-specific photographs take on the decrepit and abandoned British army bases in former West Germany where Gough’s family was garrisoned during the Cold War. They speak of an abjectness and blankness tempered by the depth of familial association. The second suite of practice use frottage, rubbings and photographic collage, to assemble a cycle of triptych forms drawn from prolonged site visits to the sites of twentieth century battle in Turkey, France, Belgium and Macedonia: locations richly associated with transgressive military intervention and now comprised of preserved terrain, military cemeteries and rhetorical topography that has long informed Gough’s practice.

From Shulhoyf to Montparnasse: Cultural Collage in Moshé Vorobeichic's Photography Book The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (1931)

This article discusses the artistic genesis of the first avantgarde photography book in Lithuanian art history, The Ghetto Lane in Wilna (1931) by Moshé Vorobeichic-Moï Ver (Moshe Raviv, 1904–1995), and aims to conduct the first in-depth reconstruction of Vorobeichic’s early biographical and creative period in Vilnius in the 1920s in the local Jewish and multicultural milieu. The research is based on archival materials from Lithuanian state archives and the Raviv family archives in Israel. Vorobeichic, who was born in 1904 in Zaskavichy (currently in Belarus), made his artistic debut in Vilnius in 1923, and studied at the Faculty of Fine Art at Stephen Bathory University from 1923 to 1925. He continued his art studies at the Bauhaus school in Dessau (1927 to 1929) and, from 1929 in Paris at the École Technique de Photographie et de Cinématographie. From 1930 onwards, the photographer used the artistic pseudonym Moï Ver, under which his avant-garde photography book Paris, hailed as a masterpiece of the genre, was published by Editions Jeanne Walter in 1931. During the same period, Vorobeichic participated in Jewish cultural life in Vilnius, and was involved in the early stages of the formation of Yung Vilne, the acclaimed literary and artistic group of interwar Yiddish Modernism. The article aims to identify the cultural contexts in which Moï Ver’s artistic world-view and avant-garde style started to develop. The reconstruction of these contexts makes it possible to identify new semantic aspects in his avant-garde photography book The Ghetto Lane in Wilna, and to rethink its artistic concept. In this way, the cross-cultural semantics of Moï Ver’s photographic collages of Jewish Vilnius will emerge.

Re-touched

Re-touched is a collaborative project by collage artist Sarah Eyre and fashion photographer Xanthe Hutchinson. Both artists share an interest in the female body, particularly the notion of pleasure in display and gaze between women and the body. The body of work that forms Re-touched combines photographic and collage methods in order to embody a sense of sensuality through the opening up and enfolding of the female form, on set and through the process of collage. The artists position their work within a framework of feminist theory that questions the binary thinking around the gaze. They draw on the writing of Laura U. Marks to bring a haptic quality to their photographic and collage interventions to the image, and in inviting the viewer to be touched by their images. Through this series of photographic collages, they have established a visual and tactile approach that utilizes the body, is collaborative and re-figures the power structures between model, photographer and viewer. Their images offer a way of rethinking and reshaping representations of the female nude.

‘Dress sense of a queen’: Cecil Beaton’s queering of Britain’s royal past

The origins of camp can be traced by exploring the ways in which the past was queered during the inter-war period. Cecil Beaton was establishing himself as one of the world’s leading fashion photographers. He and many of his friends were fascinated by the styles of the period before 1914. That interest extended to cross-dressing and the construction of photographic collages that ironically juxtaposed the fashions of the past and the present. The effect of this was to make the dresses and aristocratic social mores of the fin de siècle appear amusingly excessive. In the process the image of royalty was reinvented through travesty and social life in Britain was invested with queer opportunity.

Serie Tener y no tener (2017-2020)

La relación persona-objeto resulta una fórmula constante y, tal vez por ello, invisible en nuestras actividades cotidianas. Me propuse aproximarme reflexivamente a esa relación, enfocándome en la tríada percepción-mano-objeto. Esta investigación se origina a partir de una metodología de escala doméstica que he explorado en mi trabajo y que consta de tres etapas, no necesariamente consecutivas o lineales: experiencia-experimento-conocimiento. Como resultado surgieron collages fotográficos que exploran la percepción táctil en el espacio cotidiano. La idea central fue generar estudios/especulaciones con la cultura material originada/adaptada en la contingencia doméstica, sopesarla como una ingesta que fluctúe en sus propósitos originales, atendiendo mayormente a sus periferias funcionales o cognitivas, quedando al servicio del instante lúdico experimental o a una especie de didáctica opaca. Aquí solo doy cuenta de algunas de estas posibilidades, entendidas como posibilidades de organizar mi experiencia con el mundo material.

Fotografia i film w praktyce artystycznej oraz propozycjach teoretycznych Davida Hockneya

In his diverse works, David Hockney has used, and still uses, various media, which in some periods of his activity gained leading significance, while in the following they were abandoned or temporarily abandoned. But no matter what medium in the given period was the main form of creativity, the focus of his interest has always been the issue of image and imaging. The article is devoted to the practice and theoretical recognition of photography, which was a kind of introduction to experiments with a moving image. The author refers to the artist's numerous publications on the theory and history of image and imaging (including Secret Knowledge, History of Images, On Photography). Photography led to Hockney's audiovisual realizations. This is a kind of repetition of the natural evolution and developmental progression of the media, also, and perhaps above all, in the technological dimension. The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, the author presents Hockney as a practitioner and theoretician, in whose activities both these activities are closely intertwined. This is a sign of the times: practice and theory are equally important, awareness of the medium, or artistic and aesthetic self-awareness of artists, is an expression of the spirit of the era in which an intuitive approach to art today seems inefficient, not to say impossible. Hockney appears to be an exemplary artist, who is extremely conceptual in his artistic practice as a consequence of his research on the history of art and a constantly developed set of his own theoretical findings. He is an artist discursively commenting not only on his work as an artist in many media (painting, drawing, graphics, set design, photography, film, computer graphics), but also an art and media theoretician reflecting on the fate of images in a changing media landscape. The second part of the article is devoted to the reconstruction of Hockney's theoretical reflections on photography and the analysis of his photographic projects. First of all, experimental Polaroid compositions created in the early eighties, named by the artist joiners, as well as photographic collages and photographic images realized in the later periods of the British artist's work. The third part considers digital movies, as Hockney calls them, audiovisual realizations referring to both his previous photographic works and experimental video films in which multi-camera systems are used.

IMAGE-MAKING AFTER PHOTOSHOP: ARCHITECTURE, PUBLIC SPACE AND THEIR VISUAL DISCONTENTS

Nowadays, I like to refer to “photography of architecture” rather than to “architectural photography”. This is intentional. Within the notion of architectural photography is the sense of a practice of image-making that gravitates exclusively around the field of architecture—thus relating to the stricter aims and legitimation criteria of that discipline and its professional domain. With the broader scope of a “photography of architecture” we may hint at a practice that, while still permeated by architecture-related subject matters, is not dependent on architecture’s specific discourses. Curiously, this approach may have deeper, if less obvious, implications for the culture of architecture and the depiction of public spaces as we have known them until today. From the untold history of architectural photography a profound contradiction emerges: Underlining architecture and urban landscapes as specific topics opposes photography’s progressive flight from a primary emphasis on its topics or themes towards an understanding of it as a self-governing form of art. As I have put it elsewhere, “it goes against the grain of photography’s autonomy to acknowledge that there is a particular practice of photography that is conditioned, or somehow individuated by its focusing on a given subject matter”[2]. If we want to enjoy the critical insights that this foreign discourse can have on architecture, we should overcome this contradiction. Indeed, in addressing how architecture and the representation of public space are impacted by current image-making, we may need to do more than just confront it with the “faithful” mirror of architectural photography. It is true that beyond the possible relevance of this subfield to the wider history of photography, architecture’s century-long romance with architectural photography has had many concrete outcomes. From Erich Mendelsohn, Le Corbusier, and Mies van der Rohe’s early uses of documentary photography and photographic collages, to the delayed recognition of photographers who mostly portrayed buildings as a service to the architectural industry, such as Ezra Stoller and Julius Schulman, architectural photography has a specific yet overreaching history. With growing architectural diffusion through various media, including the internet, the practice has also had the opportunity to amplify its field, find its new heroes, and open up to innumerous practitioners. Through the early adoption of visualization techniques such as photomontage to the proliferating commercial uses of retouched images of just-finished buildings, architectural photography has established its own degrees of autonomy. [...]

Piecing Together the Empty Interior

Piecing Together The Empty Interior reflects on a body of digitally–produced photographic collages: “The Myth of Home” explores the psychological complexities of home as related to loss and longing. “Portraits” and “Portraits II” explore the room as a form of self–portraiture. In each of these works the room is portrayed through photogram images that depict an interior as empty, or in other words, devoid of people and objects. Here, an empty interior exists suspended in time in a state of entering a future or exiting a past. In this sense, an interior becomes an imaginary space pieced together in a virtual media and open to the construction of new interpretations about the architectural narrative of the room itself. The psychology and principles of Gestalt, and its influence on perception, provide a framework that situates these works as encounters with internal states of being; the mnemonic experience of space; and the embodiment of making images. These photographic works explore the transitory nature of empty interiors relative to memory and anticipation.

Nada que decir, sólo mostrar. Género y colonialismo en el fotomontaje de Hannah Höch

En la Alemania de entreguerras afectada por una profunda crisis económica y social, un grupo de artistas dadaístas desarrollaron el fotomontaje como única arma política con la que unir arte y vida en un mundo saturado de imágenes. El presente artículo analiza los collages fotográficos de uno de sus miembros, Hannah Höch, para conocer cómo, además de dar buena cuenta de los problemas que golpeaban a su país, pusieron de relieve las implicaciones políticas que albergaba la construcción de un imaginario del Otro (en su doble posición de género y raza). En este contexto, consideramos que las obras de Höch dan respuesta a un panorama político marcado por la inserción de la mujer en el mercado laboral y el imperialismo colonial, adelantando ideas de artistas de los años 70 informadas ya por la filosofía de la deconstrucción y la teoría queer.

Photo collage-based photograph display system on mobile computing platform

In the last few decades, mobile computing platform technology has grown rapidly, as observed from smart phones that have quickly become ubiquitous. The mobile computing platform is the most widely used platform in our life today, and digital photographs captured through these devices have become routine for most people. In this study, we propose a novel artistic method for displaying photographs in mobile devices as a photo collage. Using our system, users can view a representative photograph as a collage of photographs associated with a certain event and access each of photographs individually. To implement this, we employ centroidal Voronoi diagram to obtain an even distribution of tiles, and use the sites as the location of tiles. We use the edge avoidance technique to prevent tiles from being located across the edges. To obtain the direction of tiles that follow near a strong edge, we employ the Edge tangent Flow field and use the field as the directions of tiles. Finally, we search for photographs that best match the tiles calculated above by using a thumbnail difference metric.

Untitled

Untitled Clare Rae (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Clare Rae. Untitled, 2016. Photographic collages; dimensions variable. [End Page 210] Clare Rae Clare Rae's photographic work is informed by feminist theory and presents an alternate and often awkward experience of subjectivity and the female body, usually the artist's own. Her performative practice often engages with architectural and other sites, using the body to articulate space. She can be reached at contact@clarerae.com. Copyright © 2017 Clare Rae

Epistemic Disobedience and Decolonial Healing in Norma Elía Cantú’s Canícula

Abstract Using the U.S.-Mexican border as the place of enunciation, Cantú’s autoethnobiographical novel insists on the materiality of the border, especially for those living on its southern side, while simultaneously deconstructing it as artificial - a line splitting families and assigning nationalities on an arbitrary basis. Being a collage of photographs from the time the writer was growing up in southern Texas and the cuentos inspired by these visuals, Cantú’s Canícula documents how border crossings and re-crossings become symptomatic of living in a liminal space and how they destabilize the concept of nationality as bi-national families must learn to live with ambiguity. On the one hand, there is the undeniable materiality of the border, with its pain, fear, deportations, and other discriminatory practices; on the other, there is a growing border community of resistance cultivating the memory that they are not immigrants, that they lived in Texas before the Guadalupe-Hidalgo treaty. The paper examines the community’s strategies of survival in the contested cultural and social space and advances the thesis that, giving her community an awareness of its homogeneity and reclaiming its place within the larger socio-political context, Cantú becomes an agent of empowerment and change. She helps decolonize knowledge and being.

Narratives of Peace and Progress: Atomic Museums in Japan and New Mexico

“Narratives of Peace and Progress: Atomic Museums in Japan and New Mexico” explores the way distinct cultures lay claim to vastly different remembrances of nuclear history. In his 1991 exhibit catalogue, “New Mexico’s Nuclear Enchantment,” Japanese-American artist Patrick Nagatani produced a photographic collage titled “Bradbury Science Museum, Los Alamos National Lab” that illustrates the complexities of cultural memory. The collage’s dominant image is a photograph of a museum exhibit that emphasizes the principles of fission, fusion, and radiation. Superimposed over the corner of this photograph, are the images of several pale, ghost-like Japanese children and a series of glass jars marked with Japanese characters. The jars reference sealed flasks of bodily remains on display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum in Japan, used to both shock viewers and document the dead. Nagatani’s collage juxtaposes two very different forms of national and cultural remembering. By overlaying the image of the ghostly children and glass jars onto exhibit panels charting scientific data, the narrative of human loss is placed in contrast to that of technological achievement. In this paper, I consider how varying forms of public remembrance of the atomic bomb, from science museums to peace memorials, can reinforce notions of progress, loss, and national identity. Specifically, site analyses of the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum and the Bradbury Science Museum in New Mexico show how sites of memory can both inspire group healing and expose lasting cultural divides and struggles with past trauma.

An artistic photographic collage on a mobile device

Computer graphics and image processing technologies for editing photographs taken by a user, and for photographic entertainment, have increased in recent years. One of these techniques, non-photorealistic rendering (NPR), is the focus of this study. In this study, we propose a method for applying David Hockneys photographic collage filtering on mobile devices by using several well-known computer graphics and image processing techniques. This process involves taking a sequence of images and extracting feature points, and using these feature points to deform an image. Finally, we obtain a photographic collage using the David Hockney style by generating a patchwork.

The International Confederation of Midwives 30th Triennial Congress-‘Midwives: Improving women׳s health globally’

To mark the 30th congress, set in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic, the opening ceremony began with a look at the history of the ICM's three-yearly global conferences, held since 1919. Although the detailed records of the Confederation's early meetings were lost duringWorldWar II, a collage of photographs and programmes of past congresses had been collected and were shown in a short video, along with film clips of the more recent events. The names of every past President were also commemorated. The current President, Frances Day-Stirk, from the UK, greeted the delegates with the news that 126 countries were represented by over 3800 midwives at the congress. She extended a special welcome to the student midwives and those attending for the first time. Every congress, she said, is ‘inspirational’, and this one is no different. Turning to midwives' work, Frances said that global progress in maternal and newborn health remains too slow, but it is moving in the right direction. Midwives ‘know what works’ and because of this, they save lives. It is important to guard the autonomy of midwives in every country. She reminded the audience that the recently published ‘Every Newborn Action Plan’ – from WHO and UNICEF – supports midwifery as the best start to a child's life.

Blazhennyi, Ioann. Fortepiannoe evangelie Marii Veniaminovny Iudinoi (review)

REVIEWS 541 of Shostakovich’s profound command of musical syntax and structure, Rofe is sensibly equivocal. Rightly sceptical of the intentional fallacy, he nonetheless roots his discussion in an understanding of theories of symphonism that were prevalentintheSovietUnionduringthecomposer’slifetime,especiallyhisearly formative years, whilst also acknowledging that Shostakovich’s famously acute ear would have predisposed him to identify with structural features already present in the Russian symphonic tradition. One of Rofe’s most interesting documents is a sketch for the Second Symphony which contains a number of mathematical calculations. Whilst acknowledging that these may perhaps refer to something as innocuous as ‘dates, addresses, to-do lists’ (p. 207), Rofe speculates that the draft can be read of evidence that Shostakovich was indeed profoundly and consciously aware of temporal proportions as a crucial factor in the compositional design of his works. Clearly written, coherently argued and generous in its engagement with by other scholars, Dimensions of Energy in Shostakovich’s Symphonies is evidence of a long-awaited and long wishedfor turn to detailed analytical work on the composer’s scores themselves, and suggests that there are reasons to be optimistic, both about the future of Shostakovich studies, and about the fate of Shostakovich’s music in the concert hall. Wadham College, University of Oxford Philip Ross Bullock Blazhennyi, Ioann. Fortepiannoe evangelie Marii Veniaminovny Iudinoi. ‘Mir Sofii’, Kiev. 2010. 336 pp. Illustrations. £4.00 (paperback). Mariia Iudina, or Mother Serafima as she was also known (1899–1970), was one of the greatest Russian pianists of the twentieth century. Born a Jew in Nevel near Vitebsk, she converted to Christianity on joining the St Petersburg conservatory in 1919. From the first, openly and deeply religious, she was confined to performing in the Gnessin Institute (where she also taught), rather than the major concert halls. Iudina was like no other prominent Soviet musician, and now her musical heritage in recordings is being recovered and published. Blessed John, aka John of the Holy Grail (b. 1946), himself a keen amateur pianist, is also untypical as a scholar, being the leader of an international movement of the Bogomils, having been forced out of Russia some seven years ago and now resident on the Costa Brava. These essays about Iudina were inspired by very few physical encounters, but more by what he regarded as a spiritual meeting of souls. It may, therefore, be unsurprising that this is in many ways a very unusual book. For instance, it begins with a dozen pages of mostly photographic collages annotated with excerpts from the later text, giving, as it were, a trailer SEER, 92, 3, JULY 2014 542 of what is to come. The conventional preliminaries only begin on page 14. The title page has the specific dates: 26 August to 6 September 2009, somewhat in the manner of a poetic cycle, reflecting the inspired and swift dictation to his followers of Blessed John’s thoughts and ideas about this immensely inspiring woman. The author suggests that the piano was Iudina’s altar (p. 305), recalling the well-known description by her normally agnostic friend Shostakovich of her playing of Bach’s Goldberg Variations as a series of biblical illustrations, comparing her performances to sermons. Thus, there is nothing intrinsically strange in calling this account of Iudina’s life a pianistic gospel. It is, indeed, the work of an experienced hagiographer rather than biographer, whose mystical link with the pianist for over forty years began in the Parish Church of St Nicholas of Myra in the Kuznestsk sloboda of Moscow. It was not until 2010, however, that he felt impelled to share his revelatory inspiration. Blessed John’s words are preceded by a foreword (pp. 17–23) and followed by an afterword (pp. 311–32) by the book’s editor Leonid Belov, in which he outlines some of the physical background of Iudina’s life, as well as lauding her saintly character. For more detailed information, he (unlike most university teachers) advocates turning to Wikipedia. In fact, Iudina was herself a brilliant writer, whose style was admired by no less than Kornei Chukovskii and Anna Akhmatova (amongst other writers she was acquainted with Tsvetaeva and Mandel´shtam — whom she visited in Voronezh...

Diasporic Activism and the Mediations of “Home”: South Asian Voices in Canadian Drama

Critical analyses of literatures of the Indian diaspora discuss the “home” of origin as a subtext and a site to which diasporas aspire to return even though it remains an unachievable ideal that is refracted through nostalgic retellings of a space that remains at best “imaginary” (Mishra 2007). Alternatively, some critics, as Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald point out, view diasporas’ relationship with the homeland in terms of “loyalty,” obscuring in the process the antagonisms that may arise depending upon one’s circumstances, antagonisms that produce “interactions” between homes of residence and those of origin (2012). In South Asian drama in Canada, many of the concerns regarding race, multiculturalism, job discrimination and violence against women and other marginalized groups are propelled by their links to the playwrights’ “home” of origin. With attention to selected plays, this paper will analyze how the networks between home and spaces of residence in multicultural Canada come alive on theatre stages through visual motifs, actors, props, and photographic collages, which confront the different trajectories of “home” that resurface in these plays. Through live scenes of imagination that speak to spectators, several plays under discussion in this essay expose how, while providing emotional sustenance for some, the baggage of “home” may also pose challenges in the home of residence. So the questions I raise are: How does home appear? To what end? And what does returning “home” teach us about the inequalities and injustices underlying the current global order?